


The Vigil

by BlackJacketsandPens



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, MEGA FUCKING KH3 SPOILERS AS IF YOU COULDN'T TELL, Spoilers - Kingdom Hearts III, also this is headcanon but shhhh, i told you i'd post it, sad tired man meets sadder older more tired man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-06 02:32:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17931155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackJacketsandPens/pseuds/BlackJacketsandPens
Summary: "Bingo! The fact that it exists is proof of your success! That means you've trained a worthy apprentice, passed down that handsome keyblade, and fulfilled your role! Congratulations! ...What's the matter? Come on, you did a fantastic job! At least smile a little!"Words like that are cold comfort, but his only comfort. Who he is, what he is, has changed over the years, far more times than he can count--- but he has his role, a role he must see through to the end.





	The Vigil

First he has no name, first he doesn’t exist---

And then he does, and his name is Luxu.

He knows what he is from the start; he has to. Knowing what he is makes him what he is. A piece of something greater than himself --- the source of all hearts, their gathering place, where all hearts come from and all hearts go. It, _he,_ is sentient, and more importantly he is lonely. So he broke off a small piece of himself and shaped it, humanoid but not at all human, shaped as one but formless and unreal, a fragment of the source of all life. Gave it a name and a will: _Luxu_. He has to know what he is, or else get drawn back into the whole and abandon his master, his father. And he doesn’t want to do that.

Luxu may be part of a whole, though, but he’s still a child. Everything is new, existing as his own person is new, and it fascinates him. Knowledge is power, knowledge anchors him further, and he wants to know it all. Humans are interesting, so different, so unique, and he learns fast that they don’t quite want to talk to someone formless, face hidden within the depths of a black hood. It’s _creepy_. Well, as far as _they_ say. He doesn’t understand why. But that’s fine, he can fix it.

A dimpled smile here, a nose there, the shape of someone’s eyes (though he can’t make them not be gold for some reason), a mop of long dark hair that he takes scissors to himself, cutting it short in a way he decides he likes. Looking like a person is fun, he finds; you can interact with them. They’ll talk to you, tell you stories, explain things when you ask. They think you’re one of them, and a kid, too, so they’ll play with you. Even if you’re not.

And he definitely isn’t. But that’s fine! He doesn’t care. He just wants to know things, be Luxu, hang out with his Master.

It’s still kind of lonely, he thinks, though. The clocktower they live in is empty, hollow, echoing, and he says as much. (Repeatedly. To a whining degree.)

He’s not sure at first if Master cares, but--- it seems like he does. One minute he’s alone, and then the next he isn't. He doesn't know where they came from, his brothers and sisters, but he doesn't care, either. They're just his. Ira, tall and pale-haired and serious; Aced, dark and huge and temperamental; Gula, small and blond and colored like him, reckless and cheerful. Ava, small and with a wild mop of red curls and freckles, and Invi, pale and dark haired and almond-eyed. There’s something not-quite-human about them all, maybe, something closer to him than to humans, but that doesn’t matter. He has friends! No, he has siblings, and that’s even better!

He loves them. They’re his. He’s got family, he’s not alone, and he and them and Master are happy.

But then they aren’t.

Everything is around him like chaos and whirlwinds and so many keys, darkness and light once in balance teetering on a knife’s edge. What’s going on? He seeks answers, casts out as far as he can, asks as many questions of as many humans as he can manage, watches his siblings gather them into Unions, watches them fight the darkness. Stay out of it, Master says, though, like he could even get involved. He doesn’t have a Key like them anyway; he _can’t_ have one. Even so, he wants to help his siblings, but…everyone has a role to play, Master says. Everyone has something special to do.

His role is to watch. 

He’s not even given a book --- he’s just told this stupid _eye_ can see the future and past and all of it, handed it and told to sit back and keep an eye on what happens so that Master can _write_ the book (that he isn’t _given_ ), and given a box with something secret inside, and sent off to watch. Watching, Luxu thinks, should be easy. It’s a big duty, something super important, something only he can do, something Master is trusting him to do --- and he’s part of Master, so he knows it has to be special if it’s what he’s trusting his fragment to do --- and he shouldn’t mind it at all. He likes watching. He likes watching and learning and studying and gaining knowledge. Doing it for Master shouldn’t be that hard. Right?

It’s all well and good, he thinks later, when it’s people you don’t know, humans you don’t care about. But he will never, _never_ forgive Master for making him watch his family fall. For making him watch a war, a massacre, for making him watch the people he does care about destroy each other.

But it's all over now, and he's all alone. Master isn't even here anymore: he was called in his true form (or a _truer_ form) in that final battle, banished again, and Luxu has no idea idea if he'll ever come back at all, let alone when it might be. He's by himself, and he knows he has a job to do, to watch and watch and watch, pass the eye on, and...wait. Wait and watch and wait and watch and--- ad infinitum. Until the rest of what he has to do comes to pass, but--- but he doesn’t know when it will be. He just has to wait until then, until the Keyblade returns. 

He finds who he wants eventually, one of the Five his sister chose (still impressed with the little trick they had pulled, an impostor in the ranks trying to escape with them and shuck the yoke of destiny), and to them, he passes on the nameless Keyblade, the Gazing Eye. His job is done, but...but there’s still more to go. There’s still more to go, but--- but now he’s not sure he’ll make it there.

He doesn't want to _disappear_. But as time wears on, he thinks it's more and more likely that he will. He's part of a whole, part of the entity called Kingdom Hearts. It was called in its fullness in that battle, banished in its fullness, and it's pulling Luxu back with it. His body, the one he'd made for himself, his form, shaped carefully by Master...it’s being slowly dispersed, slowly absorbed back into the multitude. He's not even sure if he'll be able to complete his task, at this rate. Little by little he's being worn away and he's scared. He doesn't want to stop being Luxu. If he does, then who's going to remember his siblings? Who's going to care about them? 

It’s then that he has an idea. He can ride bodies --- push his not-quite-a-heart into them and take over, ride one and live their life and live his life until its end and then take another. Over and over, body after body, life after life, and he’ll watch. Watch and wait and watch and wait, like he was told. Until the Keyblade he’d passed on comes back around, until it’s time to wake the lost. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be waiting, but...he has to wait. It’s his job. It’s his job like it’s _her_ job, her with her Dandelions and him with this. He has to just...wait. Watch and wait alone.

So Luxu throws away the body he'd made, gives it back to Kingdom Hearts, and leaps into a human’s body, the first one he can find.

He will look back eventually and realize he’s lost track of how many people he’s been, how many names he’s had besides Luxu. None of them truly matter, none of them truly affect him-- not entirely. They leave marks on his being, as he shifts from life to life, but he carries nothing with him between bodies besides his memories. The weight of them all, all the lives, the stories, it weighs him down, and he’s not the boy he was all those years ago. He doesn’t know who he is, really. He’s Luxu, he knows that, but...his personality has changed so drastically over the hundreds (thousands?) of years that he can’t tell anymore. He’s so _tired_. He’s tired. He’s tired and he wants to stop, but he can’t. He has a mission, and even if he’s grown increasingly resentful of it, increasingly bitter, he needs to see it through. That’s the one thing he lives for now, the one thing keeping him going. He needs to finish his mission. 

He doesn’t linger in his original worldline --- he can’t, it’s long gone, the War destroyed it and sent his siblings falling into worldlines scattered to the winds --- but he doesn’t linger in the one he escaped to, the one he followed the next wielder of the Eye to. He goes from worldline to worldline, life to life, longer than he can express. He’s so tired. But he has to keep going until he finds the blade, the Eye, again. 

Eventually, he ends up in a town, a castle town --- he’s shucked his most recent body already, and he’s a formless thing, seeking a new body. He needs one and fast, too; the darkness is here, the Eye has a master, and his mission is coming to its end. He’s so tired, so relieved to be at the end of the road, finally able to see the close of the curtains, that he doesn’t think too hard, doesn’t pay too much attention. He sees someone interesting, someone he thinks is an easy target, and slips into them, reaching for their heart to absorb it into himself, into the multitude he’s connected to, take the body for his own.

He... he isn't expecting what happens next. 

A human heart is a strange thing. It can be close to shattering one moment, dim and near to giving up, but somehow still manage to have light in it. He doesn’t expect that -- doesn’t expect so little resistance from the man, doesn’t expect him to simply let him, doesn’t expect the man to have his own magic, something wild and fae and so close to his own spatial talents, doesn’t expect him to be _protected_. He isn’t expecting this man to be so different than any of the thousands before him, but he is, and --- and something different happens.

It's nothing like sharing a heart, nothing like that --- Luxu never had a heart. He doesn't exist with a heart, just simply exists, and so there's no heart of his to merge with the human's, there never has been. He simply eats their heart, absorbs it into him, fragment of their source that he is, and he becomes that person. But this time...this time it’s the heart that absorbs him, drags him into itself. Everything he is, his personality and thoughts and memories, likes and dislikes, his very 'self’, all his thousands of years --- it's consumed by the human heart, not erased but made seamlessly a part of it. 

He is Luxu and he is Braig Tallow and he is both at once and he is two sets of memories, two different people, but there is no definition between, he is two but he is one, he's always been one, he's both and neither and it's overwhelming. Memories overlap and separate, thousands of years of thousands of people bleeding together with this man’s scant few decades, and he can't--- is that his wife lying there dead and bleeding, red haired and freckled, or his favorite sister? Is that his son smiling at him or his own reflection, is he a father or does he just have a father? Who is he, who is he? What is he? 

Eventually he settles, eventually he blinks the last of the confusion out of his eyes and pulls himself together. There's no longer any way to separate the two of them, nowhere to start pulling them apart--- they're just a _him_. Just one man. Braig, Luxu, he's both of them. He can never be anyone else--- all those thousands of lives he’s led, thousands of people he’s been, it’s...it’s led to this, and this is the end. It’s over, and he can never have another face but this. It's dizzying, disorienting, he's human but he's not, for the first time he’s not just wearing an empty shell, for the first time he’s _someone,_ for the first time in thousands of years and thousands of faces, he has a _heart_.

He has a _heart_. A real one, one of his very own. A heart, and it comes with things he never thought about, never dreamed of having, never considered or thought worth his time, no matter how long he’s existed. A conscience, morals, all those human things and conceits that he’d been above and beyond as a fragment of an eldritch and unknowable being. He’d ever been like his namesake, Luxu --- _luxuria_ , lusting after knowledge with an amoral fervor. He needed to know, to know everything, all there was to know, and he’d never once cared what he had to do to get it, never cared about anything or anyone getting hurt. It didn’t bother him. He wasn’t human, then, after all. He couldn’t process why it would hurt, why people would be bothered. Human limits were beyond him then. But...now they weren’t. Now he understands.

He understands, and he supposes that’s a good thing. Master hadn’t had limits, either, and look where it had led them all. In any case, though, it’s not all good, having a heart. Now he can really grieve, and it’s overwhelming. All those lives, all those faces, all the lost in all those years, he can grieve for them, and they’re all just as real to him as his siblings now. All the previous lives, this one’s life --- Braig’s wife and son are just as real, just as much his as his siblings. It hurts like hell, and...alright. So he doesn’t wish it would stop. Okay, he does, but at the same time...he has a _heart_. One of his very own, for the first time in centuries upon centuries. He has a heart, and he’s human, and this heart will remember those he’s lost, it will remember all of the lives he’s led. He’s more than a fragment of Kingdom Hearts given form and will--- he’s a real person, with a heart of his own. He is Braig as much as Luxu, and he doesn’t...he doesn’t regret becoming what he is now.

But even so, he still has a mission to carry out.

Once he’s able to adjust, he’s quick to realize this worldline is one without a war entirely, where it’s just a legend. Well, once he’s able to adjust --- he realizes later that the shock of his entire identity shifting around, the shock of becoming what he is now put him out for a week. Eventually, though, he wakes up and can look around where he’s ended up.

When he does, he decides pretty much immediately that he hates it. Not the world itself; the world itself is beautiful, but it reminds him too much of Daybreak. It reminds him too much of home, and the people in the castle scrape too close against his most precious memories. The two guards, one calm and silent and wise and the other temperamental and quick to fight. The scientist, cold and logical, and the child that comes later, so very innocent and curious. The king, a seeker of knowledge and a father to his people. The mischievous duo, so like the youngest of his brothers, and the sunshine-hearted little princess, bright and red-haired. They’re all so much like those he lost so long ago, his very first life (the one that hurts the worst even after all this time), that he can’t stand it, and he spends the first few years of his time there enjoying his new life’s taste for whiskey, the new weight of his losses enough to keep him at the bottom of a bottle for a while.

But...he can’t stay like that forever. As much as it hurts him, he’s still human now, more human than he’s ever been--- and slowly he opens up again, slowly he gravitates towards warmth and affection and a new family. He can’t help but care about them for the same reason it hurt to be with them; they’re so like the people he lost all those years ago. But they’re different, too, they’re _not_ those he lost. They’re their own people. He learns them as well as he knew his siblings, knew his lost wife and son, better than he ever tried to learn those in his many previous lives. He even ends up with a _crush_ on one of them, on the scientist, on the logical and rational man who sought knowledge above all else --- he reminded him of himself, a little, the himself he used to be, and he was--- he was _human_ , besides, very human amid that same desire for knowledge, and--- well. He _liked_ him.

He spends ten full years on that world, growing older like a human and learning how to live this life, the life of the man named Braig, the man he now was --- a normal guy with a secret and sad past, a castle guard, never forgetting who and what and where he had come from, what he’d been, never forgetting his mission...but figuring out how to be more than that, now that he _was_ more. But...that didn’t last forever. Only those ten years.

One day he reunites with his sister, in a way he both did and didn’t expect, and even if her face has changed, the face she put on to become one of the Five, he knows her and will always know her. Even if her young and unmarked form hurts him deeply (he’s so old now, old and tired, and she’s still the same girl he left in Daybreak), and even if she has lost her memories, it’s still a comfort to see her, and he’ll make sure nothing happens.

An old man comes to the garden, those ten years later, a man carrying his master’s Keyblade, carrying the Gazing Eye. It isn’t the man he’d passed it down to --- and that’s when he knows it’s time. It’s time for things to keep going, his plan to start again, and he’s shocked to realize how little he wants it to. All this time waiting, the _thousands of years_ waiting...and now that it’s time he doesn’t want it to be time. He wants to keep being Braig. He’s so tired, he’s so bone-deep exhausted, his heart aches with it, but...he’ll see his siblings again. He’s almost done. He’s almost done, and he’ll see them again when he is. He’s stupid, though--- stupid and reckless and tired of waiting, and he decides to get involved. It’s so easy to pretend to be a greedy fool, playing a part and ingratiating himself to the old man, make a deal to help him all the while making his plans. He makes up lies that are truths in a way, about his son, about his desire to have a Keyblade for his own, and allies with this old bastard. (It’s all true; he does want his son back, he does want his Keyblade back, but he also knows Jasper is most likely dead, and knows the _real_ reason he wants it back--- it’s just a matter of what he doesn’t say.)

He doesn’t expect to be scarred for life, and he sure doesn’t expect to be possessed.

He’s trapped in another plan that isn’t his own, now, and he hates it. Not that he has much of a choice, really, now. And really, this is means to an end. He _will_ get that Keyblade back, and he _will_ finish his mission. No matter what he has to do to get that goal. Even if it hurts like hell, having to betray his new family, even if it hurts like hell to see more kids with Keyblades, so like his own first family, his own siblings and their little unions. Even if it hurts like hell to be back in the Badlands, in the graveyard, seeing the ruins of where those siblings fell to each other. He will finish this. It’s what he’s been waiting for for thousands of years.

No matter what he has to do, though, he’ll do it. It’s both so much easier and so much harder when he loses his heart, not having to worry about all those pesky human emotions and inhibitions--- he’s like he was before being Braig, and he almost enjoys it even if it shakes him, even if part of him hates it. Losing his heart disorients him again, but...he’s still Luxu. Still Luxu, still Braig, and it’s surprising. Even without a heart, he’s still...he doesn’t lose either part of who he is now. He’s still both of them, and it sucks. It sucks, but he can’t care that it does because of the loss of his heart, so he just carries on. 

He hides his sister, then, somewhere safe and out of the way— he cannot have her involved when she does not remember her role any longer. But even without her memories, she’s still done her part — she’d sent him help; another of the Five and three other Dandelions, pulled from the worldlines they’d been tossed into without memories, just like her, the price they all paid, and without their hearts. He doesn’t know if Ava had done it, or it happened on its own, but he pulls them into Xehanort’s plan all the same.

He pulls them into it all the same, and watches the newest children prepare to combat the darkness, prepare for this final battle of this second war --- fights a few of them, too, tests their skill and resolve --- and he’s so tired. He’s so tired, he’s so ready for this to end, and--- and it will. It will end. These kids will see it through.

And it does. It ends, and he has his heart once more --- Braig and Luxu still one person, mingled together and feeling all the weight of their years and all the new guilt on top of the exhaustion and grief --- and it’s time. It’s time to call his siblings, to see them one more time, and it’s time for their plan to move forward. It’s time to end his eras-long vigil, his millennia of waiting. It’s time to bring them back.

Maybe he’ll have some time to be with his family again --- both of them, his siblings long lost and the family that waits in the Garden now --- and part of him desperately wants it, but...even if he does, he’s been on this road too long not to finish walking it.

When he sees the Master, his Master...maybe he’ll ask him why it had to go this way. He doesn’t know.

But whatever he doesn’t know, he knows one thing: he just wants it to be _over._

**Author's Note:**

> I told you I was going to post this.
> 
> Me, screaming into the void: LUXU ISN'T EVIL HE'S JUST SAD AND TIRED LET HIM REST, PLEASE, PLEASE LET HIM REST.
> 
> Credit for the MoM is an eldritch being/Kingdom Hearts goes to my KH Discord server/my friend Syd, so shout out to @pridecloaked on Tumblr! And credit for the Skuld-IS-Ava theory is MINE AND YOU'LL PRY IT OUT OF MY COLD DEAD HANDS. /cough
> 
> And for those of you that know AST/my existing Braig headcanons? See, told you I'd be able to keep them. They just got squished together into one nice neat Braigxu package, rather than Braig ceasing to exist when Luxu hopped in. Gonna be weird for Jasper, but hey. He still has his dad.
> 
> (Shamelessly plugs Braig/Even in here too, the ship agenda.)


End file.
